An Introduction to Class Warfare for the Software Engineer
medium.com
medium.com
No, I think most of these are usually part of the job of a software engineer, and it's part of developing solutions that work, rather than just gaming individual metrics. (And, at Staff+, all of these are.)
> There is no reason at all for engineers to continue performing this kind of free labor for entities that are trying to cut their wages. It is in their interest to do the exact opposite.
It's not free labor. It's part of the job for which we're paid.
Seems like anyone on a project team who doesn't share knowledge, help other team members, document, etc., would soon be disliked by team members who are focused on the project and team.
Isn't it why any serious engineering job will have stocks as part of the comp package? That's pretty much the whole point: if the company does better, your stock does better...
It's that old Supply & Demand thing again.
That's called a "cartel", and the big problem with cartels is the members cheat on them under the table. They're unstable, unless maintained by force (i.e. using the law to punish members who cheat).
I recall one job I had where I was offered X, and I said X wasn't enough. They said they weren't officially allowed to pay more, but they would if I kept my mouth shut. Deal!
What is the basis for this assertion? Is this why OPEC exists?
Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
A company raises the price for something, and it's called 'price leadership', other companies recognize it is in their interest to follow suit and prices go up. The same dynamic exists for wages. Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.
How do you explain price decreases?
> Years of not enforcing anti-trust have left us in a pretty bad spot.
And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
2021 was the most profitable year for big corporations since 1950, with pre-tax profits rising to $2.5 trillion and after-tax profits surging 35%, enabling the 1% to finally overtake the middle class in share of overall wealth.
53% of price increases went straight to profit.
They've got you right where they want you.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2022/05/10/how-w...
> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
?? City traders can make millions, they actually get a cut of profits they generate.
Corporations decide to set their prices higher, and you have a price inflation. We know that this is not merely a function of their inputs going up because many companies have been pulling in record profits during this time period. Nobody needs to meet in a smoke filled room for this to happen.
> And yet STEM graduates were getting $200K+ for their first jobs. How is that collusion working out?
You're being distracted with a nickel while your pockets are being emptied. It's all relative. Look at the cash big tech firms have in the bank. Google used 60B dollars to inflate their stock price this year with stock buybacks at the same time they laid of 6% of their workforce.
OPEC has had a constant problem with cheaters selling oil under the table.
> Is that why in 2010 Department Of Justice had to step in to break up a wage suppression cartel between Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
Yes, it was a cartel, and the companies were cheating on it. Remember when Jobs complained to Google that Google was cheating on it? There was nothing holding that cartel together.
> If it wasn't fpr the force of law, they would happily cooperate to drive you into poverty.
Cartels have never managed to do that, unless they were (ironically) enforced by law.
The american police often breaks the law themselves and kills people.
Does it mean we should get rid of police, they don't work just like cartels don't work?
Anyone reasonable agrees murder rate would be higher if there were no police at all.
A cartel does not need to be perfect to achieve wage supression.
You should look up work of Steve Keen in the theory of the firm. It's actually the other way around, the oligopoly pricing is stable, while pricing that sets marginal cost to marginal revenue is unstable.
Like the “job description” is often pretty vague which makes wage theft easy. If you’re working 996 without extra pay or less pay because everything that your “job description” has cannot be done realistically in a 40 hour work week, then it is by all means, free labor.
Just because you’re getting paid doesn’t mean the company doesn’t get free labor. The company paid for the regular hours and the rest was free labor.
they are just saying, if you are contracted to be payed x per hour at 8hrs a day, unless you work 8 + n hours, wherein n gives you no additional hourly pay, then its free labor to the company (above and beyond contracted work hours), not sure what is controversial about that?
I thought that in 2023 would be clear to everyone that only capitalist countries were able to improve the well being of the people. I see 0 boats from Miami to Cuba, just the other way around. So even though we can agree that people working in some fields have a hard life, for a fact, we know that in the communist countries they didn't have a better life than before, as we saw in the Holodomor, the famine that was caused by the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property. Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages.
Other capitalist countries managed to improve the well being of the people because of wars and financial imperialism.
Holodomor had a lot of reasons, collectivisation was not the main one.
It is not right. The same "collectivisation" was tried in different countries like GDR (1953 uprising), and China, great Famine, 1959. So same strategy led to same results in different countries.
Collectivization initially leads to decrease and then to increase. In USSR result got so bad due to collection of reasons, unrelated to collectivization. Collectivization was badly needed in USSR, since 95% of population were inefficient farmers. It was a must for later industrialization.
If I sell something with a 2-for-1 deal, what are the ways that’s different from selling two for 50% off?
If I am paid to work 40 hours a week, and I work 80, are the second 40 free, or are all 80 %50 my expected wage?
> free to leave
<spicy> Ah! I see we agree on the need for such a robust social safety net that employment isn’t any degree of necessary! </spicy>
I was talking about “free” and I was not talking about “stealing”. That’s why I used the word “free” and did not use the word “stealing”.
Regarding your hypothetical, I’d say they’d be giving you approximately free money in much the same was as in the prior hypothetical you’d be giving them approximately free labor.
See here [0] for more theory , but the basic tl;dr is since all value is created by labor being done (your employer, the capitalist doesn't actually do anything to create value) and not all of it is paid out in the form of wages, the workers are being exploited since value is being stolen. Reducing the amount of that wage theft is not the other side of the coin.
This remark from TFA at least implies when it "is" part of your job, go for it.
Perhaps you have rejected, or simply not engaged with, the "call" to recognize class warfare, however, or if I can be silly I'll call you a "capital sympathizer". From the frame of recognizing workers vs capitalists, you can't just say write off being exploited as "well you were paid to be exploited" without coming down hard on the "sympathizer" side.
One of the points I assume the author was making is that much of this isn't your actual job, and voluntarily performing work that ultimately costs you is exploitative and adversarial and, well, stupid. Even if you're paid to do it.
About 20 years ago my employer informed the entire company that we would be working December and January without pay and if we didn't like it we would be "laid off" (much of that work would be spent training team members of an offshore/outsourcing firm). State labor law disagreed with them regarding work without compensation so they were forced to pay "minimum wage" (for software developers and DBAs!). You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.
> You can "well that's your job" all day long, and you're technically correct, but you're ...wrong.
Working for minimum wage wasn't part of the contract you signed ("your job"), so your example isn't valid.
The article is, ostensibly, a call to recognize class warfare, and certain elements of "engineering culture" as aspects of same. Did you sign up for class warfare?
If you simply refuse to participate in the notion of seeing this as class warfare, super!, but that's actively disengaging from the substance of the article.
There seems to be lots of nasty class stuff going on, throughout society.
But TFA just seems to hurt legitimate discussion of class issues.
Imagine you're skeptical of the suggestion of class problems, but since a post about that was upvoted on HN, and you're open to being convinced, you took a look. Unfortunately, after reading it, you have to chalk it up as a data point: of someone who thinks there's class warfare on tech jobs also having very unfortunate idea of what the nature of that job is.
If you speak to people who work in trading or finance, they do none of those things. They view each other as conpetitors and don't help each other. They aim to outgame and outdo each-other.
The culture in software is very different to most other industries. But if you look at other fields of engineering, you don't see people stepping outside their roles as much.
I don't know in what aspects of trading or finance that collaboration is necessary (rather than applied game theory towards each other).
Trading and finance are interesting examples, because those are two places where a lot of money-driven students would go, before tech jobs because easy money (rather than something nerds did for the love of it).
Rather than "Greed is Good" Wall Street thinking taking over, we should say "Fine, we admit it, tech pays good money right now, but we do our best work by working as a team, and that's how we're going to do it."
Then we follow through by making the messaging consistent in offers, raises, bonuses, performance evaluations, promotions, project management, metrics, etc.
Lets not get carried away thinking we are specially noble.
The guy in Nebraska maintaining one of key dependencies of your project thanklessly disagrees[1].
Well, we build stuff. we praise the knowledge. We were called geeks, hackers, etc. I can just compare software engineering with science like math, * engineering, physics.
Finance market as put by the other contributor, is just what we are not, and why Linux exists, why FOSS exists, why internet exists and services like github, trello, gmail exists (even though you want to scream at me, they are there for profit, they were all created with one goal in common: Collaborate openly with others). Egoist finance sharks aren't example of success, virtue and happy life, no matter what.
That's not the conclusion, unless you think that Class Warfare plays a role anywhere. I don't.
Protip: Organising collective action will become impossible if everyone hates each other and keeps information from each other for fear of their own job security. That will help capital in the end.
> Oh, yeah, we should also have a union. Sure. Let’s get on that one of these days.
It seems like a how-to guide for how you as an individual can push the value of your labor down to match the price that capital wants to pay for it, rather than trying to find a way to gain some leverage over capital in order to raise the price of your labor to reflect the value you currently provide. (Leverage like, say, collective action.)
> Once the company reaches the bottom, and capital starts suffering from the damage it is inflicting on the company, it will turn around.
Well, good luck surviving the extra rounds of layoffs between now and then if you're the one who stands out as not working well with others, I guess.
This is the author's opinion of how Software's Labor can "fight back"
If you're not in an adversarial relationship with your employer then this advice will not be particularly useful/advantageous.
Are you saying we shouldn't take those literally, but as what the new (bad faith) thinking about the job should be?
So essentially taking out all independence from work and making it a dull box checking job.
And actually, the best thing that can happen to you as an investor / capitalist. Let employees create their own peer pressured environment. The same phenomenon how coal miners used to conduct.
You just lean back and enjoy the benefits of them controlling and supporting each other
Edit: I've also been on the hiring side and passed on people I know like that. My job is to mitigate risk, and those people are a liability.
Your post is entirely singular and individualistic in perspective. We could look at the situation differently, from the perspective of OP. In this case, it would be you and your politically aware colleagues who understand the necessities of the situation. To put it boldly, it is a revolutionary movement that seeks to introduce a much needed balance into the equation of capital and labor in the age of thinking machines. You and your colleagues will get along just fine, if you are clear eyed comrades.
And you will sleep even more soundly, knowing that you are not only helping your contemporaries, but also laying the foundation for a more equitable society for your progeny.
It's adversarial whether you integrate that understanding into your actions or not. And acknowledging the adversarial nature of workers and owners doesn't mean you have to be nasty to anyone on an interpersonal level.
How much compensation I get is adversarial.
How much documentation I write or how many internal tools I develop isn't adversarial, not even if you put la liberté guidant le peuple above the fold.
It's not adversarial, it's set by market conditions. Only collusion can turn it into an adversarial matter, as seen e.g. when Big Tech CEO's were shown to have entered into a secret agreement not to poach each other's employees.
My broader point is that zero-sum sub-games don't make the entire game zero-sum.
Your perception of your negotiation skills is likely very biased by the Dunning-Kruger effect: you rarely use negotiation skills in adversarial settings, so your perception of how good you are at it compared to professional negotiators is likely highly inflated.
It is not adversarial. It is a mutually beneficial, win-win relationship.
It's the unions who (mistakenly) frame it as a win-lose relationship, which is why businesses don't like dealing with them.
Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or any company where a significant portion of ownership laid with the workers), now that's a different story...
Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.
If this were true, Asset Stripping and corporate raiders wouldn't exist
The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked.
Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.
I'm much more concerned about the deals I'm forced into without having ever accepted, such as paying tribute to the rulers.
Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door.
And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.
Those jobs were all created by automation.
Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.
> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.
(those are the conditions that the article describes, not me)
Should there be?
Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically.
The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper.
It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock.
But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then.
> Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good.
> Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce?
The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking.
I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time.
Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected.
And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that.
But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.
You gave a bunch of examples for why people don’t need unions, because laws will protect them, then undercut your examples with your personal anecdotes about making yourself valuable. You don’t need laws to protect if you’re “valuable.”
… but you’re only valuable until you aren’t. That was the whole point of the original article. Some of the most valuable workers in the world are currently getting kicked out on their asses by the bosses who’d been getting them massages and laundry services, free food and free transportation.
And no, becoming valuable doesn't undercut anything I said. It means you have other people willing to hire you. This is an economic problem, with real profits going down even as numbers go up thanks to inflation that got boosted by energy supply issues.
There are issues from technical disruptions, e.g. the proverbial buggy whip makers. But these are more reason to understand what you do that gives value, not less. For example, if I were an artist, I'd be learning how to use Stable Diffusion, not hoping that I can continue to live on simple image commissions.
The laws against collusion aren't going anywhere, but if you expect to do things that no longer have value for money, you're living on borrowed time even if the government mandates purchasing of your work.
It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand". It's the Law.
> impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested
Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone else, or start their own company.
> Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe working conditions
were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. It's no surprise that those went away when productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10 year old could be useful at in a modern company.
Wow. just incredible. I've never seen the take that kids working in manufacturing jobs were necessary.
Begs the question, necessary for whom?
How many children should we use to grease the wheels of capital accumulation? How good is this system if that’s what it requires.
I toured Mt Vernon recently (George Washington's estate). He was probably the richest man in America at the time. You and I live better than he did.
You seem to think there was all this wealth sloshing around at the time. Nope.
The inequality you’re pitching only ends in one place.
Something like 97% of the population worked on the farms in those days trying to raise enough food.
Do you know that women in America use to spend all day in the kitchen managing the wood stove, which was very labor intensive? Any free time they had was spent spinning, weaving, sewing, and mending.
Gas/electric stoves are modern miracles, as are sewing machines, electric refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, all sorts of liberating machinery. And most especially, indoor plumbing! Who do you think ran out to the town well constantly to pump a pail of water?
Do you know that it wasn't until 1800 or so, and only in the US, where the ever-present spectre of famine was eliminated? Economies simply were unable to produce enough food. It wasn't that the rich were eating it all. There just wasn't enough food.
Which means it's all hands on deck to work. Other problems were it was very expensive to produce cloth, so for people to get clothing, lots and lots and LOTS of people were needed in the textile industry.
There's no way to sugarcoat it - this is completely false. There were many regions around the world that were prosperous, many for far longer than the United States has been around. Humans have been smart for a long time, far longer than our current global technological civilization... [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_befo... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_world [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Mongol_Empire [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece#Economy [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_economy [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Ottoma... [9] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/blighted-by-empire-what-... [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_economy#History [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt#Government_and_e... [12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation#Matu... [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Africa [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia#History [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs#Economy [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Inca_Empire
Children found working throughout Hyundai's supply chain, 12 year olds working in manufacturing jobs in the US - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
New proposed law in Iowa that allows children to work in meatpacking, mining, and other dangerous jobs. Employers not civilly libel if killed: - https://www.commondreams.org/news/iowa-child-labor-laws
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#%22Brain_eater%22
Your coworkers are not your adversaries, your employer is. When the going's good, each side is generous. When your employer withdraws their generosity, it pays to think twice whether your continued generosity works in your interest, and more broadly in the interest of the industry, and society. The limit being a grueling, subpar environment where underpaid and overworked employees find solace in comradery.
The effect on the culture was pronounced and teamwork went out the window.
Everyone was worried they were next, so they put their head down, concentrated on their own tasks and didn't help each other.
Layoffs can really destroy a company's culture, especially multiple rounds.
It was pretty damn effective. The damage still resonates to this day, long after the colonial powers left.
No one paid any attention to the man behind the curtain; they were too busy killing each other.
All true thought work should be done on your own time for your own projects. CEOs don’t deserve your mind, so don’t give it to them.
Excellent statement. The rest only applies if you can confirm that your company is seeking to devalue you. That is becoming more common but I don’t think it’s universally true.
I've met everyone above me on the org chart. It's not that impressive because we're smaller, but we're also not doing layoffs and I can talk to people who make human decisions, rather than folks who are trying to cut 10% of expenses off of a spreadsheet by firing "resources."
So I don't think it's quite the same.
If you think about your retirement prospects as amassing wealth by optimizing the "Area under the graph", it's really important to build a professional network so if one job opportunity ends, you can quickly work your network to find another similarly paying job.
Failing that, you take a big pay cut, and impact your salary history. I can't imagine an employer making an offer to you which is competitive with your job from 5 years ago, instead of your job right now.
Also in some cases (maybe less engineering, but sometimes even then), your professional network is part of what your employer is buying when they hire you. This is true especially of ex-govvy security engineers.
TL;DR don't be a dick to your coworkers, even on your way out the door. It's in everyone's best interest.
I don't think this is borne out in practice. I've done very well and very poorly over the decades. It would have to be a very specific situation (lot of events unluckily coinciding) where coworkers/previous position could influence an interview process today.
I know people (the aforementioned ex-govvies) who have no need of LinkedIn, because this is how they navigate their careers. As you get more and more established in your career, the jobs for someone of your level are less and harder to find.
Do you believe the supermarket shelf stockers think this way?
Yes, you've come to understand yourself to be in a different socio-economic class than supermarket shelf-stackers, the class of people who "optimize the area under the graph". But what you fail to see is that your employer has no incentive for maintaining your status in a different socio-economic class, and lots of incentives for changes that drive you, the exalted, mutually loved, always cooperative SWE into the same life+work situation as a supermarket shelf stocker.
(apologies, if necessary, to all the fine shelf stockers who are just living their best lives; all 3 of you)
I don't fail to see the point of the article, I just think it's wrong.
> your employer has no incentive for maintaining your status in a different socio-economic class, and lots of incentives for changes that drive you, the exalted, mutually loved, always cooperative SWE into the same life+work situation as a supermarket shelf stocker.
Worker protections are good. So is being good at your job.
We can, and should, strive to have it both ways.
What's not good is disparaging people who don't have as prestigious a job as you. (And you are doing exactly that)
Even shelf stockers have basic human dignity; Don't be a dick.
Sure, but no thanks to their employers. Are you telling me that you don't know anyone who doesn't actually like their job, and gets nothing from it except a paycheck? Because it certainly sounds that way.
And the opposite is true: if you are running a company, make it your employees priority that the company grows and incentivize them to achieve more!
This only makes sense if you assume that work has negative value
Imo it's the other way around: more work has more value (up to a certain point) because you acquire new skills and grow, and have the satisfaction of solving interesting problems
However,
> don’t pay any mind to burning bridges
not all bridges should be burned. If you mean the bridge between you and a company, yes, said bridges should not be treated as anything more than a rope bridge over a canyon. I would limit burning bridges between individuals because the relationships you create are more important than just about everything else you will do on the job. Unless I really hated my boss or supervisor, I would not be so quick to burn that level of bridges.
Until they invented stock options and started handing them out left right and centre.
Something something prisoner's dilemma Nash equilibrium tit for tat.
The fact that there are (relatively) few employers, and that these employers have already chosen to seek their fortune (or that of their shareholders) by tapping the excess value of their employees, means that it is much easier for their interests to all align, without coordination.
However, the vastly greater numbers that make up the employees have no natural alignment, and tend to be too diverse in their own personal agendas to align even deliberately.
This asymmetry is the principle reason why unions, though imperfect, are a great idea. They attempt to gloss over the vast range in the agendas of individual employees by forcing employers to deal with an aggregate. The alignment of interests among the employees may not be perfect with a union, but it is a lot closer than it would be otherwise, and can offer (sometimes) a real balance to the easily aligned interests of employers.
Call me an elitist gatekeeper, I don't want to pay dues to protect dunces and have my employers keep paying them.
insert capitalism vs. communism handshake meme
I haven't researched it, but I imagine railroad engineers probably went through a similar economic reality in the early 20th century. What the author doesn't really get, is that there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. The party is over. Salaries will never be as comparatively high as they were in the 80s and 90s, no matter how many code reviews you try to sabotage (weird "advice," by the way).
In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth, so expecting to be a 1%'er while working for BigCo as engineer #23435 is an unrealistic expectation to have.
[1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/it-jobs-are-no-longer-exceptional
Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.
You cannot call it home ownership, when these people are in decades of debt for their houses. 20-25 years is what I'd consider lifelong debt, if you enter it in your 20s. And for many it makes financial sense to go into that lifelong debt. When the parents croak about when they're halfway through paying, they have the option to sell the inheritance and can get free from the debt. To finally take back control of their life - but in reality to refinance and get a car and continue to feed the banks.
I saw an interesting factoid some time ago. In the early 20th century, it was considered enough to have 7 m2 of living space for an adult and half of that for a child. If people still considered that enough, they could buy homes and be debt free before 30. But because people can reasonably expect to afford more, they take loans against future earnings to buy bigger and better homes. Meanwhile, students live alone in apartments that once housed families.
The discussion is not about a specific area or your specific area. There are large parts of the US where there is no such NIMBY voting allowed, much less enacted to prohibit construction. Prices have more or less ballooned everywhere in the US.
Random home in Southern CA: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1414-N-Center-St-Orange-C...
Random home in Boulder CO: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/175-Gold-Run-Rd-Boulder-C...
Random home in Edmond OK: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/7105-Robey-Dr-Edmond-OK-7...
There were 0 votes on housing in Fargo, ND over the last few years and new homes are consistently over 400k because the land is cheap. The issue is not some uniform voting block artificially inflating housing prices. Random home in Jacksonville FL: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1414-N-Center-St-Orange-C...
It's called zoning. Do you know of any notable residential areas without zoning?
In most of the US, additional zoning is welcomed. Zoning for smaller locales is controlled by financial limitations, rather than entrenched interests. Who doesn't want utilities to be brought to their area? For example, Puyallup WA is ~40 mi away from Seattle and there are still residences in Industrial zoned areas waiting for residential zoning to bring them sewer access. It's about the cost, not grassroots opposition.
Most towns can grow in every direction as fast as they can build. The issue is cost of land development and regulation, moreso than NIMBY influence.
Sure, changing zoning from "light industrial" or "commercial" to include some level of residential is often welcome, and is generally a good idea. But such changes are not the crux of the battle over housing. We don't actually want towns to grow in every direction without bounds, as a general rule: we want them to have sufficient housing that the people who need to live there can afford to do so. That typically requires dealing with the zoning laws that prevent increases in residential density ... i.e. NIMBY-ism.
Did it start that way though? I feel like from the 50s-70s, outside of a narrow slice of academia, companies were mass hiring (and training!) people to program.
If you have to pay to train people, the technology tends to be kept simple and understandable.
I used UNIVAC mainframes, not IBM. They had a different control language which wasn't too bad.
Yes, they did. Being a locomotive engineer was a high-status job around 1900 or so. It was a union job. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers was the first major union in the US.
The same thing happened to electricians (heyday around 1920), radio engineers (peaked a bit later), and television engineers (peaked around 1970).
Being a printer was once a good unionized job. I've seen homeless printers talking about the good old days at the Burger King near the Civic Center cable car turntable in SF.
Who will be the first homeless ex-Googler?
There are plenty of unhoused tech workers, already.
In the 80s and 90s programming salaries were not very high, it was a decent middle-class job. Sure, there were outliers if you hit a big IPO as always (e.g. Sun in the 80s, Netscape in the 90s, among others). But salaries? No, they were generally in line with other white-collar middle-class jobs like accounting or such.
It's only in the later 00s and particularly the 2010s that mean programmer salaries exploded to the point that now entry level jobs in SV can be 180K+. It has never been as good as the last 10 years to enter the programming workforce.
The last 10 years of ballooning salaries are a mirage perpetuated by the FED's irresponsible quantitative easing. Who cares if you're making $180k when an entry-level house in your area costs $2 million. Not to mention that the people making that much in the first job is a fraction of a fraction of the workforce.
People keep saying this, and people who own software companies REALLY seem to want it to be true, but as far as I can tell, it's the opposite. I occasionally work with kids fresh out of college and they find themselves completely lost in the maze of modern software stacks that abstract distributed file systems and dependency management and security that fail for what seem like incredibly arcane reasons ("what the heck is a trusted certificate authority and why doesn't it like mine?"). Developing software today requires fairly deep knowledge (or access to somebody with deep knowledge) of nearly the entire history of software development.
Its only nonsense in the mind of plebs. For the class that's waging that war, its quite real. They are aware of what they are doing.
Personal attacks are against the site rules, by the way.
That's quite a dramatic change. Maybe it is inevitable because most jobs not involve computers.
> In the capitalist game, being an employee is never going to be a way to garner any real amount of wealth
In the capitalist game, being an employee is the only avaliable starting position to 95% of the population. It it does not allow a way to garner any real amount of wealth, then we cannot have social mobility and best people getting to the top. Then we are all poorer.
While you don't get paid the exact revenue you generate, I think that this kind of work has inherent value. It has plenty of learning opportunities which lead to income increases (edit: through promotion or going to a different employer, whichever is more optimal) because you become more productive and knowledgeable over time
As far as engineering culture is concerned, you're worse off working with anti work types like op because you don't learn as much and piss away more time, providing fewer learning opportunities in the long run
If you did, why would a company hire you? The idea is the employee must create more value than he costs. And the employee gets more pay than his labor is worth to himself.
That's why it's a win-win relationship.
Productivity has increased and wages have not.
But there is a huge risk the software will never make money. Billions have been spent on failed software, the employees got to cash out and not care. So you trade risk for reward.
In any case, neglecting the value of employee benefits makes comparing salary to productivity a completely worthless statistic. What needs to be included are the values of:
1. health insurance
2. retirement benefits
3. stock options
4. so-called employer contributions
5. all payroll taxes
6. 401k employer contributions
7. stock purchase plans
8. sick leave
9. vacation
10. severance pay
11. bonuses
12. profit sharing
These can add up to 50% more than the salary.
Don't overlook that the primary customer of the WSJ is not conservatives, but businessmen who are looking for accurate business information that will help them make money. If the WSJ just delivered pro-business propaganda, that would not serve their customers' needs.
I subscribed to the NYT for a while, and finally gave it up. Their business news was all propaganda, and of little use for things like picking a good company to buy stock in.
> It’s not in your interest as a worker to let capital think that its workers are saboteurs.
And although documentation can make you somewhat replaceable, it is a joyless and tiring experience to work on something that is quickly evolving yet completely undocumented. I'd rather be made slightly more replaceable if it meant my job wouldn't be a tiring, joyless grind.
Companies also don't have a way to quantify this, and sometimes will hesitate to term someone, until they are fed up and will just decide it is worthwhile at all costs.
I have worked with or been the successor to folks who did this and it made me absolutely furious, and reflected poorly on my performance.
It's also hostile to the practitioner if they last long enough at the same company.
I end up reinventing my "clever" (until I forget the context at least) hacks more often than I care to admit and I'm not actively trying to sabotage my company.
>If you’re a conscientious engineer, you are probably going to find the above suggestions somewhere between counterintuitive and horrifying. You should! They are horrifying! This is how deeply capital’s war on workers is scarring our profession.
>These people are actively trying to take your wealth away from you and keep it for themselves. You need to protect yourself.
>Oh, yeah, we should also have a union. Sure. Let’s get on that one of these days.
The real dichotomy here is simple: it's between people who understand that they own capital and work to maximize their return on that capital, and people who don't.
I would guess, theoretically, this is impossible past a certain size of enterprise, but in the meantime I would imagine that they would be both. A capitalist laboring as part of their own means of production.
Thus, they're being a laborer when they perform productive work, and they're being a capitalist when they pocket the wealth that business as a whole (i.e. all employers collectively, rather than just themselves) have generated. And if they don't actually do the latter, there's no economic exploitation involved.
Sure one can. One can be a "laborer" in the sense of spending one's working hours doing work for an employer instead of starting a startup or owning your own company, and also be a capitalist in that same context in the sense of using your skills as bargaining power with your employer to get the best return on the capital you own (in terms of your pay and benefits), and judging your employer's treatment of you on that basis.
The inconvenient part is that, in the context of working for an employer instead of starting a startup or owning your own company, you are almost guaranteed to not be getting the best return on the capital you own; you have given up some return on capital (often a significant amount) in exchange for not having to manage business risks by yourself. Which in turn means you are exposing yourself to the risk of your employer deciding to manage their business risks by laying you off. But that's not because you're "labor" instead of "capital"; it's because you made a risk tradeoff that came back and bit you.
This is not what being a capitalist is, in the context you're using it. Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work. That's it.
Gets fuzzy when you start adding a 3rd group of people in there, the people who have to work (i.e. they don't have enough capital to generate the kind of income that puts them in the don't have to work crowd) but identity with the capitalists. They see themselves as removed from "laborers" and strive to be in the capitalist class, dress like them, act like them, talk like them. Marx would call them the petite bourgeoisie.
I understand what you're trying to explain, thinking about individual capital ownership or even using your skills as capital... but that just isn't what it is. Your skills only have value if you're using them. To labor and create things of value.
capitalist (noun): filthy rich monopoly man
capitalist (adj.): pro capitalism
Yes. That's true of everyone, including those that you are calling "capitalists". But that being true, and a person knowing that it's true and acting accordingly, are two very different things.
> Capitalist vs laborer is basically someone who doesn't work, but their money does vs someone who has to work.
If you think that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, etc., don't work, you are egregiously mistaken. They work very, very hard. They just don't work at the same things that low level tech workers do. That's because they understand, as many, if not most, low level tech workers apparently do not, that the best use of their work--their labor, the hours they put in doing whatever it is they do--is to maximize the return on their capital. So they optimize their work towards that goal. Whereas most low level tech workers don't even think in those terms--and that is why they are at the mercy of the "capitalists" who do.
(The usual economist's term for a person who doesn't work, but "lets their money work", is "rentier", and the associated behavior--getting into a position where one can have a steady reliable income without having to work--is called "rent seeking". There is certainly an element of that in the way many rich people act, but I don't think it's the primary issue in the context of this discussion.)
The real argument for those "capitalists" being overpaid is not that they don't work, but that most of the work they are doing is not actually creating wealth; it's just transferring wealth from others to themselves. But that has nothing whatever to do with them being "capitalists" instead of "laborers" and "laborers" being underpaid. It has to do with our entire system of social incentives being screwed up because for decades now we have increasingly allowed short-term viewpoints to undermine the long-term stability of our social institutions. "Class warfare" rhetoric, in fact, is one of the ways that has been done.
I didn't say half of what you're asserting, just trying to clear up the definitions of some terms you were getting wrong in the context that you were using them in. If you want to talk about this, which is essentially Marxist theory, and then argue against it... some familiarity with the source material would be good to acquire.
I'm not sure what you're basing that on since I'm responding to things you explicitly said.
> If you want to talk about this, which is essentially Marxist theory
I have no idea what you are basing that on. The only thing I said that was at all related to Marxist theory was my reference to "class warfare"; yes, Marxist theory was one of the culprits in using class warfare rhetoric to obscure economic realities. Which is why countries that tried to run themselves according to Marxist theory were abject failures that killed many millions of their own people, either through incompetence or through deliberate "can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" logic.
There aren't any, despite Leninist theory often being presented with a misleading (in the context of “running a government”) prefix of “Marxist-”. (There are a number that tried Leninist theory, or theory descended from it such as Maoist theory.)
Second: I know you have no idea what I’m basing that on. That is my point. You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just going off half cocked about whatever you THINK I’m talking about. I just gave you a subject you could choose to educate yourself about if you wanted to sound sensible about the windmills you’re currently tilting at. But from your response I see that isn’t going to happen.
p0pcult: Explain what Karl Marx would tell a five year old a capitalist is
ChatGPT: Karl Marx would tell a five year old that a capitalist is someone who owns a business and makes money by hiring people to work for them and selling the things they make for a profit. The capitalist gets rich, while the workers who make the things only get paid for their time and effort. This is what Karl Marx calls "exploitation."
p0pcult: What is a capitalist?
ChatGPT: Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production, such as factories and businesses, are owned and controlled by private individuals for the purpose of generating profits. In a capitalist system, goods and services are produced and distributed in a market economy, and prices are determined by supply and demand. The goal of a capitalist is to accumulate wealth and capital through ownership and investment in businesses. [Emphasis mine]
Capitalists acquire wealth, passively, by owning things.
Karl Marx himself knew he was peddling bullshit; he once told Engels, "I have of course so worded my proposition as to be right either way."
The real tragedy is that several generations of intellectuals swallowed his bullshit hook, line, and sinker, and in the 20th century well north of a hundred million people died as a result. I would hope we have figured out by now that that philosophy doesn't work.
> Capitalists acquire wealth, passively, by owning things.
Then by that definition, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc. are not capitalists, because they created things, they didn't just passively sit there and acquire ownership of things that already existed.
(Btw, even ChatGPT appears to get this since, in the very passage you italicized, it talks about "investment".)
Please, do yourself a favor: stop digging. The hole is only getting deeper.
[1] https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1857/l...
> Capitalists control the means of production
As far as machines in factories go, yes, the owners of the company own those, the workers do not (unless the company is a worker cooperative, those do exist).
As far as skills go, though, no, capitalists do not control those--the people who have the skills do. But they need to realize that their skills represent ownership of capital in order to make the best use of their control over them. Many, if not most, "workers" do not realize this--and hence they are at the mercy of the "capitalists" who do.
In reality being a good person is what pays off long-term. If I'm laid off, I will continue my professional journey elsewhere - perhaps on my own, maybe even with more satisfaction?
Yes, one does. One needs tech skills. Those are capital. (You agree with this since you say tech workers get more valuable with age and experience.) They're just not capital in the form of a large pot of cash that can be used to throw money at problems.
If you insist on refusing to view your own skills as capital, you're just giving up the chance to maximize (or at least improve) your return on that capital.
Skills are the ability to meet spec quicker than someone who has to learn as they go. Sounds like potential energy to me. Since capital acts like potential energy, it follows that skills are capital.
I don't really get why you're using that definition, though. Was the person you responded to not clear as to what he meant by capital, so you misunderstood and thought it was human capital? Or did you just want to derail into a semantic discussion?
If you want to mind-bend people into believing skills are capital, then all the workers in the world are bona-fide capitalists, since they are using their skills to get paid.
I have no interest in the communist vocabulary. Communism killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century. I would hope we have figured out by now that communism doesn't work.
> all the workers in the world are bona-fide capitalists, since they are using their skills to get paid.
In the sense that most of their pay is return on capital, not "labor", yes, that is exactly right.
However, the extent to which workers realize this, and act accordingly, in order to maximize the return on the capital they own (their skills), varies extremely widely.
So did Capitalism [0]. Now what?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Livre_noir_du_capitalisme
Just the fact that people think the world is left/right, socialist/capitalist proves that these two allied ideologies have been extremely successful in the last century.
The logic that attributes those deaths to "capitalism" is lot more sketchy than the obvious fact that the deaths I attributed to communism were directly due to the actions of governments who explicitly declared themselves to be communists and who directly took the actions that resulted in the deaths with the explicit purpose of advancing communism. "Capitalism" isn't even a single philosophy, let alone one with an explicit manifesto that all the governments who killed all those people in the name of communism explicitly said they were following.
The problem is that it is normalized in western ideology to consider any death in communist countries as death by communism and any death in capitalist countries as explained by several other factors that do not relate with capitalism.
> "Capitalism" isn't even a single philosophy,
But I can say the same for communism. Or any other concept: there always will be differences in interpretations. And capitalists do not need an explicit manifesto because they are already the hegemonic power. They already succeeded in their past revolutions to give power to the bourgeoisie. The ideals for what they fought in the past are already normalized in the society.
When arguing for or against communism (as is the theme of the article and thread) we need at least to have some common understanding of what a word means. "Capital" is generally understood as exclusive ownership.
> In the sense that most of their pay is return on capital, not "labor"
No, most workers earn their pay from labour. Applying your skills is still labour.
I think the pandemic was a happening that made more people than ever realize they can and should change their life course to better suit their needs. So many people are changing careers to get a better return on their skills and effort. There are whole industries now that are starting to have a hard time getting enough labour, because they can't find anybody willing to be exploited even short time. And sometimes that's not deliberately by the individual business owner, some sectors are just not lucrative enough to continue - unless they change profoundly.
Sure, and you exclusively own your skills, so they meet this definition.
> Applying your skills is still labour.
The time you spend applying them is labor, yes.
The knowledge on your part of how to apply them to produce much more value in that time than a unskilled worker could produce, is capital. And the fact that you can get paid much more than an unskilled worker if you have that knowledge, and use it to be more productive, is return on capital.
> many people are changing careers to get a better return on their skills and effort.
I.e., return on their capital. Yes, exactly! They are realizing that the capital they own is worth more than they were being paid before, so they are changing careers to increase their return. Try doing that as an unskilled worker and see how far you get.
You can never exclusively own skills. If somebody else achieves some skill or knowledge that I have, I cannot use the force of the government to stop him from having those. A capitalist can and will use the force of the government to stop others from using the things he has laid claim to: Land, natural resources, equipment. A capitalist can create capital out of thin air by making money, and use the force of the government to stop others from making money.
That's the difference that matters.
> Try doing that as an unskilled worker and see how far you get.
Right now I think it is mainly unskilled workers who are changing sectors, as they are the ones who can benefit most from it. If your job cannot get worse, there is no reason not to change. As for skilled workers, they have already climbed a few steps on the ladder.
That is true, but it's irrelevant here. When you use your skills to increase your productivity, it's your productivity that gets increased, not someone else's, even if they have similar skills. That is the sense of exclusive ownership that is relevant to this discussion.
> A capitalist can and will use the force of the government to stop others from using the things he has laid claim to
So can a non-capitalist. Anyone who is willing to use the government as a tool to further their own ends can. That is a much broader set of people than "capitalists".
> A capitalist can create capital out of thin air by making money
No, that's not what creates capital out of thin air. What creates capital out of thin air is creating something that increases productivity. Just "making money" does not do that. Money can of course help with creating something that increases productivity, but it can't be done just by making (or spending) money.
> and use the force of the government to stop others from making money.
Again, this is not a problem of capitalism, it's a problem of corruption: people using the government as a tool to further their own ends.
> Right now I think it is mainly unskilled workers who are changing sectors, as they are the ones who can benefit most from it.
I don't think this is true. Skilled workers are far more likely to be underpaid as compared to the productivity they are capable of.
> As for skilled workers, they have already climbed a few steps on the ladder.
I don't think this is true either. Skilled workers very often are not able to climb on the ladder, because their skills are not being recognized or compensated properly as compared to other skills that ladder climbers have, like schmoozing and taking credit for other people's work. And once they recognize this, they are far more likely to be both willing to and capable of finding a better job that compensates them better for the skills they have.
The post I responded to (GGP of this one) said "skills are not capital in the communist vocabulary". Did you mean that if you are a communist, there's a good chance you don't think that skills are capital?
It would have likely have been more accurate to say, "in the language of Marx skills are not capital." It would probably be more accurate for my comment to have been, "if you don't have the propensity to call yourself a communist you probably don't worry about whether or not skills are capital." This is because for me the common feature amongst communists (in a free society) is their belief in simple solutions, and unwillingness to engage with their unintended side effects.
Funny how that keeps being thrown out but nobody really has done a full accounting for the deaths due to rapacious capitalism. I've seen figures of 100 million to 150 million from two World Wars, colonial wars, anti-communist campaigns, repressions and mass killings, ethnic conflicts, and victims of famines or malnutrition. Some accounting says 20 million people die every year due to the effects of capitalism, such as starvation, lack of access to clean water, lack of access to shelter, lack of access to medicine, and unchecked disease. Remember when the pandemic wasn't over and businesses said everyone had to go back to work or the economy would break? Credible counts say there are 16 million empty homes in the US[1] and around half a million unhoused [2].
1 https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/16-million...
2 https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
Well, capitalism also killed hundred million people in the same century following the same logic... Modern capitalism and institutions also came from bloody revolutions, created a world order with colonialism in XIX century, produced wars to dispute such colonies and global power in XX century and did a lot of bloodshed also in XX century because it was afraid of losing power to socialism. If we use this logic, we cannot discuss any philosophy or social theory, probably all them produced several deaths.
There is still bargaining and possible bargaining power disbalance, but software engineering supply and demand are such that rates only went up for many years.
Even if you have a team of various skill that is ready to work for free (including finance, legal and design), you still need funds for marketing, hosting, etc.
Try starting a logging business, when other people have already laid claim to the forests. Try agriculture when other people have laid claim to the land. Try contracting with the government, when the rules say you need to prove previous government contracts to be eligible. That's real world issues.
Cloning and blackmailing of online businesses are not such big threats that they can effectively stop somebody from making a good online business. If you're honest, have a good idea, and put in some hard work you have a fair chance of success. In some other sectors, those factors can amount to nothing - and all the threats you listed apply to offline businesses as well.
Knowledge workers are still workers at the end of the day. You have nothing to live off of but your own labor, it is along these lines that your interests align with other workers.
The guy is making a point here.
Do not add to your employer's assets unless you are expressly instructed to.
Quite simply, don't write any software to improve your employer's operations unless you are instructed by your boss to do so. Don't use your own initiative to do something unless it is acknowledged and approved by your superiors.
Factory workers don't go about fixing broken equipment on the assembly line. The equipment manufacturer's service employees are the ones who do it. Trust me, those guys won't touch any piece of equipment until they are instructed to do so in writing from the customer or from their managers.
Software and engineering guys are only to happy to write stuff for their employees and even sign agreements not to develop their own software even when it isn't done on company time.
Heh, are there actual companies where this is possible? If I went off coding random pet projects to "improve operations" I'd get in trouble real quick. Unless it's discussed and prioritized from higher up it's hard to make time to work on substantial projects. Maybe I should be looking for a new opportunity eh!
I've seen companies where this was presented as a benefit. The small ones said things like "you have X ours a week you can spend working on whatever part of our product/infrastructure you want, even outside your current role!" while bigger ones restricted it to "corporate hackathons" (aka work after hours for a cold pizza and some warm beer).
If there's a why to persuade an engineer to work for free, out there there's at least a couple MBAs who've tried it.
This new post says that's already happening.
Ah, so no change then?
/**
* This is the constructor
*/
Software is unique as a means of production precisely because it is a much more efficient way to turn labor into capital assets (software programs). I think the way out it presents us is to start software focused businesses that are wholly employee owned without VC input; bootstrapped as employee cooperatives.
I'm working on this right now, although it's a hard climb to figure next steps. Anyone else interested?
I like this idea and think it's in the same vein as proposed in Developer Hegemony[0]. Stumbling blocks for me:
- I don't think anyone in my network also wants to do this and I'm afraid to take the first step. This one's on me obviously.
- health insurance. In the US, it seems small business health plans only cover full-time employees, and a certain number of covered employees are needed to have a decently-priced risk pool (so good luck if not everyone is all-in right off the bat). The individual insurance marketplace absolutely sucks, at least in my state, cynically viewed as by design but also probably because it's a Lemon Market.
- reputation. How do you generate quality leads and close deals without either an established reputation as a business or significant funding?
[0]: https://daedtech.com/developer-hegemony-the-crazy-idea-that-...
This is an extremely misguided essay. It conflates two types of programmers. There are two classes (as in labor classes) of programmers. It's like confusing the difference between an electrician and an electrical engineer. Many businesses already recognize this fact, but the author doesn't seem to have a clue.
The first, "programmers," do routine things to implement features, which it sounds like the author is advocating everyone turn into.
The second, "software engineers," are a new class of workers, knowledge workers. Creativity and collaboration are core job functions for this class of workers. Is implementation a piece of it, yes, but it is decidedly not the point of the job.
Software engineers ARE "the machine that makes money". Trust is the mechanism that keeps a technology company viable. Apple and Microsoft are great examples. They are ascendent when there is trust in the motives of the company, but when they were headed for rent-seeking or "lost their soul" (for lack of a better description) they quickly started declining and were on the path to bankruptcy or at best irrelevance.
For a software engineer leaving is like leaving a half completed painting. You leave behind the artifacts, but they were never the (most) important part.
When leaving the company is sufficient to change its prospects (taking your ball with you) elaborate strike behavior is unnecessary. Without creative engineers, tech companies will die and creativity requires psychological safety.
And yet the investors and senior executives still get 7- to 8- figure compensation, pull down yet more money from stock buybacks, and generally benefit. The overall amount of money changing hands doesn't go down, but less of it goes to the line employees while more falls into the pockets of the ones with already overflowing pockets.
A plan is to shame management and foment collective response.
E.g., as background - Research on profits vs time for companies - Research on real wages for SWE vs time for same companies - Illustration on timing of layoffs compared to these
And, as foreground: - Collectively asking management for response to these facts in available forums, e.g., town halls or slack channels
Or, if these fora don't exist - creating them by collective action e.g., meeting with each other and discussing at these meetings
Small side point: while the post opens with an image referring to events of 1830 there is almost no history in the post. If anyone has recommended links to some actionable history that would also be useful
I agree class warfare is real and is being waged, but based on even the author's description of the term "capital" I don't think they have a good grasp on what class war looks like. Everything they advocate runs counter to any and all notions of worker solidarity.
Instead this article seems to be an instruction manual for how to be an unwitting saboteur to your fellow employees' quality of life to no real benefit of your own. It's not like you are going to ingratiate yourself to the company acting this way, nor that earning accolades will make them more likely to promote you to the ownership class.
Also, unionization, good choice as always. And doing exactly the work you are being paid for, not more, not less.
Tech workers are prone to giving away free labor and the author's "advice" illustrates one example (things which are "part of the job" but really separate from the core of The Machine). Continuing the analogy: when you hire a plumber to fix your toilet, he doesn't repipe the rest of your house or do your laundry unless you pay him specifically to do those things. Your relationship is transactional and without loyalty on either side. Just like how most employers view their relationship with employees.
Many if not most tech workers suffer from misplaced loyalty towards their employers, whose owners will continue coordinating as a class, taking all they can, while workers remain distracted and divided.
That's how I justify my pay increases, by becoming more efficient and making the organisation more efficient.
I look at where the organisation is going and solve problems.
I would welcome an article that started with the goal to further the same thesis but got there in an alternative way.
AI could eliminate the need for some of your services. It will likely eliminate the need for some of your employees. What would WW3 do to our business? How about another pandemic. Only the companies who are flexible and adaptable will make it.
While I'm not wholly unsympathetic to those laid off, I've personally found that people that post this kind of thing are the first to try and guilt you into free labor themselves.
This is actually our central business model. We sell B2B automation/workflow software so that other companies can retain much cheaper talent. Most of the people involved would define our product as "progress", but I can understand how others would perceive it as a form of warfare.
My expectation, unfortunately, is that for the biggest players it won't be much more than "we have to pay more for talent to be willing to work for us."
However, for some it may play out as it did for the survivors of the early-00s dot-com bust. I know of one company, in particular, that narrowly avoided bankruptcy by laying off about half of their staff. They did this in the ugliest way possible (at the time) ... having people sent to rooms to receive either "you're safe/new job" letters or have their badges taken from them and walked -- en mass -- out the door after an apology speech delivered via video.
Unfortunately, this company was located in a market that even in the worst economic times never broke 1% unemployment for devs/engineers. When the need to expand/fix what fell apart came, they found it impossible to hire mid-level and above programming and support positions[0]. After discovering an unusually low number of referrals (despite large bonuses offered) for programmers, they polled staff and found that the issue was the reputation of the company among the staff's professional network... and being a (still) large employer in the area, that represented the overall reputation of job-seekers in the area[1].
The company I worked for (or, at least, the company that we merged with) had a similar problem, though had a much larger pool of engineering talent to pull from (and I'm not sure they ever did "door #1/door #2" style lay-offs). It was a big problem for them for a few years, but was managed by increasing offers and accepting less qualified candidates (which are realities for large businesses with a lot of bureaucracy, anyway).
[0] I know of several cases where they paid employees to move across the country in order to fill needed positions. It was always puzzling to me why they didn't just hire remotely, but they had a reasonably centralized operation.
[1] My buddy continued working there after they laid off most of his coworkers; apparently the environment improved, dramatically, about two years later but the hiring problem persisted until he left a decade later. I suspect it's better by now. I don't even know if the company has the same name.
This has all the practicality of college freshman Marxism combined with the slapdash rhetoric of a Medium post.
The 19th and early/mid 20th century lenses used in this blog post are just not relevant to todays tech worker. The labor theory of value simply doesn't apply in the world of power law distributions we are now in.
Except there is absolutely no reason to believe this at all. Author is just making stuff up. If they were doing that, it would be to cut wages; layoffs are not part of it.
Maybe some cuts were needed to reassure the Street and support the stock price, and maybe that's easier to do with some air cover about interest rates and shit, but everyone remembers what happened the last time even one of the big actors broke ranks and started doubling people's salaries: Google has had a little problem called "Facebook" ever since. I'm not sure I'd be keen to repeat the experiment with OpenAI/ChatGPT and ByteDance/TikTok running around. FANG has had a good run but they're not invincible.
So I don't think they're going to be able to meaningfully depress big tech compensation for very long. But who knows, I've been wrong before.
I think you could see a bifurcation in Eng tracks at FAANGs.
People commenting about the layoffs keep citing the financial health of the companies that are doing the layoffs as evidence that there is some ulterior motive, but this misses why companies perform layoffs.
Companies don't choose to hire when they are profitable and layoff when they are losing money. As an example, most tech companies spend their early years losing money while growing hiring and no one assumes they have an ulterior motive.
The reason companies perform layoffs is that they believe the labor they are buying is more expensive than the profits from the products they were planning to build with those employees. If they think consumer demand is going to drop, then new investment opportunities won't be as lucrative and they thought they were.
Yes, it sucks for the employees and yes we want corporate leaders to have better economic foresight so this doesn't happen. But you don't need some elaborate Marxist theory of class warfare to explain why this is happening, and it does not represent monopsony collusion.
Thats it. Thats where the Marxism enters. Most of these companies (or the bigger ones) aren't losing money with these new products, they were just losing profit margin because its profitable but not as profitable. They chose to have fatter profits over your employment and wellbeing.
WRT your employment, you’re not their top priority, so they shouldn’t be yours.
Also, FWIW big companies lobby to keep healthcare employment tied, not because they love paying for healthcare, but because they love the forced loyalty - it makes quitting/being fired way more risky. Companies expect 2 weeks notice on quitting, but will lay you off overnight via email. Companies will ask you your salary expectation to underpay you, but won't tell you their salary range up front (except in California where it is now law to do so). The imbalance is crazy.
Otherwise you could just work in government and get paid bellow average but be stable in all economic environments.
Maybe, if you consider the company as a whole. If you consider the product line, no, because the product line isn't earning revenue yet. It's a bet on the future.
21st century IT work is Marx's wet dream come true and an occasional layoff doesn't change that, it's not that those laid off are doomed to experience any hardship. There are (still) plenty of offers with stock options and it still pays at least top quarter.
There is an important caveat however - you have to be good. Marx couldn't imagine only 5% or so of those willing being good at working the lathe. You'll only need class warfare if you're no good.
As an engineer, I'm not falling for his sad attempt to drive a wedge between tech workers, engineers and management. I have more in common with tech company lofty goals than I do with his.
> Google, Amazon, IBM, Spotify, PayPal, Salesforce, 3M, Coinbase, and more are all conducting mass layoffs at the same time.
Yes, it's a conspiracy just to lower tech wages, not a recession.
You would think, wouldn't you, that the several dozen countries over the last 100 years that became avowedly Marxist, and turned into prison farms that citizens couldn't wait to leave, would have convinced everyone that it doesn't work?
But no. The college freshman mentality keeps vomiting it up again.
Yeah, I figured it was yet another attempt to sell Marxism.
I was hoping it might be a funny discussion about object oriented design, but it wasn't.
Wait...
But also, the "SWJs" that ESR is talking about have almost nothing to do with the class warfare described in TFA. If you think they do, you don't understand SWJs or the marxist-sense of class warfare.
I built/build things ... and I'm telling you that your analysis is wrong. Yor antipathy towards what ESR terms SJWs and to unions and the understanding that a class war has been ongoing whether you want to admit or not is blinding you to reality that "naive utopian hacker culture" might have been a good driver for technological "innovation", but it has never been how the world works, nor will it be.
I'm asking for context, one quote from the article I already read is not providing it. It's only confusing me further. I did not understand your perspective after reading that article, so you quoting one line of it that seems especially salient to you from your perspective is not helping me understand you.
Breaking down the acronym in his essay, I don't really see the connection between the "social justice" advocacy he is specifically criticizing, and the advocacy in the article for worker rights / class equality.
And to be clear, I'm really doing my best not to voice any opinion for/against Raymond's own views in that essay or the author's views in the OP submission - I just truly cannot understand why you are drawing this comparison between the subject matter of each article.
Edit: I think you provided half the analogy in this reply, but I can't perceive the connection to Raymond's article or understand why you are drawing that connection. To reuse your quote, what is the connection between engineers refusing to "go the extra mile" as described in the OP, and the creation of "a hell-pit of competitive grievance-mongering and political favoritism for the designated victim group of the week"?